On the last night of the holidays Madame Perceval came up to say good night to them, and sat beside Paul on the foot of Flip’s bed.
“It’s good night and good-bye, my children,” she said. “I leave on the five thirty-two, tomorrow morning, and Georges will take me to the train and be back before you’re awake.”
“Couldn’t we see you off?” Flip begged.
“No, dear. I don’t like leave-takings. And in any case it’s best for you to be fresh and have had a good night’s rest before you go back to school. Work hard on the skiing. Paul will help you on weekends, though you don’t need much help anymore, and I expect to hear great things of that ski meet. So don’t disappoint me. I know you won’t.”
“I’ll try not to, Madame,” Flip promised, and she knew that both she and Madame Perceval meant more than just the skiing and the ski meet.
“Paul,” Madame said, “take care of your father and take care of Flip. I’ll keep in touch with you both and maybe we can all meet during the spring holidays. Good night, my children. God bless you.” And she bent down and kissed them good night and good-bye.
After the Christmas holidays, the exciting and wonderful holidays, there seemed to be a great difference in Flip and her feeling toward the school. As she ran up the marble staircase she no longer felt new and strange. She realized with a little shock that she was now an “old girl.” Almost every face she saw was familiar and the few new ones belonged to new girls who had replaced her as the lonely and the strange one. She stopped at the desk where Miss Tulip was presiding as she had on the day when Flip first came to the school with her father and Eunice. Miss Tulip checked her name in the big register and handed her a letter. It was from her father.
“Oh, thanks, Miss Tulip,” she cried, and slit it open.
“My darling Flippet,” she read:
I told you not to worry if you didn’t hear from me for a week or so while I was traveling. I did get you off that one post card while I was in Paris having twenty-four hours of gaiety with Eunice and now I am in Freiburg in Germany and will be traveling about for a month or so around here and across the border in Switzerland. It seems a shame that I will be so close to you and not be able to come to you at once, but I missed so much time while I was in the hospital with that devilish jaundice that I must work double time now to try to make up. However, I think I may be able to manage to be with you for your ski meet. I shall try very hard to make it. I want to see you ski (but, darling, don’t worry if you don’t win any prizes. The fact that you have really learned to ski is more than enough) and I want to see your Paul. I don’t know where I shall be during your Easter holidays, but wherever it is I promise you that you will be there too and we’ll sandwich in plenty of fun between sketches. And don’t expect much in the way of correspondence from me for the next few months, my dearest. You’ll know that I am thinking of you and loving you anyhow, but my work often makes me unhappy and tired and when I stop at night I fall into bed and it is a great comfort to me to know that you are warm and fed and well cared for and that you have learned to have fun and be happy. I know that it was difficult and I am very proud of my Flippet.
With the letter he enclosed several sketches and Flip thought that Madame Perceval would have liked them—except the ones he had done of his twenty-four hours in Paris with Eunice. Flip crumpled the Paris sketches up but put the others carefully in the envelope with the letter, slipped it into her blazer pocket and started up the marble stairs just as a new group of girls came into the hall and started registering with Miss Tulip.
On the landing she bumped into Signorina. “Have good holidays, Philippa?” the Italian teacher asked her.
“Oh, yes, thank you, Signorina, wonderful! Did you?”
“Lovely. But it is good to get back to our clean Switzerland. So we have lost our Madame Perceval. I shall miss her.”
“Yes,” Flip said. “Yes, Signorina.”
Erna and Jackie came tearing up the stairs. “Hello, Signorina! Hello, Flip!”
“Pill, mon choux, it’s good to see you!” Jackie cried as Signorina went on up the stairs. “When did you get here? Isn’t it wonderful to be back?”
“Flip, meine Süsse!” Erna shouted.
Perhaps it was not wonderful, but neither was it terrible.
A group of them congregated in the corridor, since Miss Tulip was downstairs and could not reprimand them. They all talked at once, laughing, shouting, telling each other about the holidays. Gloria could not wait to show them the black lace and silk pajamas Emile had sent her for New Year, nor to tell them about Flip’s visit to the school chalet with Paul.
“You should see Pill’s boyfriend,” she shouted, “you should just see him!”
“That child? We saw him,” Esmée said in a disinterested voice.
“Out the window the day the hols began? Don’t be a dreep, Es. He’s no child. You’re just jealous. Pill brought him to the chalet for lunch, and he’s dreamy, positively dreamy, isn’t he, Sal?”
Sally grinned and nodded. “He really is. I never thought Pill had it in her. She must have a whopper of a line after all.”
“All I can say is hurrah for Flip,” Maggie Campbell said. “I’d hate to see Esmée get her claws into someone as nice as that.”
Esmée turned angrily toward the laughing Maggie but Jackie broke in. “I went to six plays and two operas. What did you do, Esmée?”
Esmée announced languidly, still with a baleful eye on Maggie, that she had gone out dancing every night and worn a strapless evening gown.
“Strapless evening gown, my foot,” Jackie whispered inelegantly to Flip. “She’d look gruesome in a strapless evening gown.”
Solvei had spent the holidays skiing with her parents. “I bet I could teach you to ski, Flip,” she said.
Oh, horrors, Flip thought. What shall I do if she really wants to try?
Later that evening Erna pulled Jackie and Flip out of the common room and onto the icy balcony, whispering, “I have something to tell you, but it’s a secret and you must promise never to tell a soul.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Flip said, thrilled to be included in a secret that Erna was sharing with Jackie.
“Jure et crache,” Jackie said, and spat over the balcony, imitating the tough boys on the city streets.
Erna was satisfied. “Well, it’s something I learned during the holidays,” she started. “Maybe you know it already, Flip. It’s about Madame Perceval.”
Jackie grabbed Erna’s arm. “Don’t tell me it’s the story of Percy’s past!” she almost shrieked.
Erna nodded. “You’re sure you won’t tell anybody?”
“I said jure et crache, didn’t I?” And Jackie spat over the balcony again. Unfortunately in her excitement she had not seen Miss Tulip walking below, and the matron jumped as a wet spray blew past her face.
“Who is up on the balcony!” she exclaimed.
“Please, it’s only us, Miss Tulip,” Jackie called down meekly.
“I might have known it,” Miss Tulip said, craning her neck and looking up at them. “Naturally it would be Jacqueline Bernstein and Erna Weber. And with Philippa Hunter. I am sorry to see you keeping such bad company, Philippa. Get back indoors at once, girls, or you’ll catch your deaths of cold, and you may each take a deportment mark.”
They retired indoors, Erna sputtering, “The old hag! On the first day after the hols too. No one else would have given us a deportment mark.”
But Jackie was giggling wildly. “I spit on her! I spit on Black and Midnight.” Then she said seriously, “Percy would never have given us a deportment mark for that. I don’t know how we’ll ever get on without her. School won’t be the same. Go on about what you were going to tell us about her, Erna.”
“I can’t in here. They’d see we were having a secret and all come bouncing about. We’ll have to wait till Gloria goes to brush her teeth,” Erna said, looking around as a girl with beautiful honey-colored hair curling all over he
r head opened the glass doors and came into the common room, glancing diffidently about her.
“Can you tell me—” she started.
Gloria, anxious to prove that she was an old girl, went dashing across the room to her. “Hello, are you a new girl? The seniors’ sitting room is on the next floor, just over the common room.”
“I’m Miss Redford, the new art teacher,” the girl said, smiling warmly. “I was looking for someone by the name of Philippa Hunter.”
“Oh. That’s me. I mean I.” Flip stepped forward and Gloria retired in confusion.
“Oh, hello, Philippa. Could I speak to you for a moment?”
Flip followed Miss Redford into the hall, and the teacher smiled at her disarmingly. “Madame Perceval wrote me that you were the best art student in the school and that you’d show me around the studio and give me a helping hand till I get settled. I feel terribly new and strange coming into the middle of things like this and this is my first job. I’m just out of the College of London and I’m afraid I shall make a terrible muddle of things.”
She laughed, and Flip thought, Well, if someone had to take Madame’s place, this one couldn’t be nicer.
“Would you like to see the studio now?” she suggested. “I have about half an hour before the bell.”
“I’d love to,” Miss Redford said. “I’ve been up there poking around. It’s really a wonderful studio for a school. I looked at some of your things and I see that Madame Perceval was right.” She paused and panted, “I wonder if I shall ever get used to all these stairs!”
Flip was so used to the five flights of stairs that she never thought of them, but Miss Redford was quite winded by the time they reached the top.
“Of course my room is on the second floor, so I shall always be trotting up and down!” she gasped.
Much as Flip liked Miss Redford, she was glad the new art teacher was not to have Madame Perceval’s rooms.
“Now, Philippa,” Miss Redford said, “if you’ll just show me where things are kept in the cupboards, I’ll be tremendously grateful. I thought we might do some modeling this term, and maybe if any of the things are good enough, we’ll have them fired. I found the clay, but I would like to know where everything else is kept.”
Flip opened the cupboard doors and showed Miss Redford Madame Perceval’s places for everything. She had just finished when the bell rang, and she said, “There’s my bell, so I’ll have to go downstairs or Miss Tulip will give me a tardy mark. I’m glad Madame Perceval thought I could help.”
“You’ve been a great help,” Miss Redford said warmly, “and if you don’t mind, I’ll probably call on you again. Good night, and thanks awfully.”
The others were in the room when Flip got downstairs. “Was I embarrassed!” Gloria exclaimed. “What did she want?”
“Oh, just to have me show her where Madame kept the things in the studio. Golly, I’m hungry. We always had something to eat before we went to bed during the hols.”
“Honestly,” Gloria said, “I think she might have let us know she was a teacher and not just come in like a new girl.”
“She didn’t have a uniform on,” Jackie said reasonably.
“Well, lots of girls don’t when they come. I think teachers should look like teachers.” Gloria was not ready to be pacified.
“Percy didn’t look like a teacher.”
“Yes, but she didn’t look like a girl either. What’s she like, Pill, this Redburn or whatever her name is?”
“Redford,” Flip said. “And she seemed awfully nice.”
“If you think she’s nice, she must be, you were so crazy about Percy.”
“She said we were going to do things in clay,” Flip said. “Aren’t you going to go brush your teeth, Gloria?”
“I’ve brushed them.”
“You have not,” Erna cried. “You just this minute finished getting undressed.”
“I brushed them before I got undressed.”
“Oh, Glo, you fibber!” Jackie jumped up and down on her bed.
“You’re just plain dirty,” Erna said rudely but without malice.
“I am not!” Gloria started to get excited. “I did brush my teeth before I got undressed. So there!”
“All right, all right!” Jackie said hastily. “Don’t get in a fuss. I’m going to go brush my teeth, though,” and she looked meaningfully at Erna and Flip, who echoed her and followed her out into the corridor.
“I bet she hasn’t brushed her teeth,” Erna whispered. “She just knows I have something to tell you that I’m not going to tell her. My father said I wasn’t to go around telling people, but you’re so crazy about Percy, both of you, I thought it would be all right.”
Miss Tulip bore down on them. “Girls! No talking in the corridors! What are you doing?”
“We’re just going to brush our teeth, please, Miss Tulip.”
“Go and brush them, then. I don’t want to have to give you another deportment mark. Step, now.”
“Yes, Miss Tulip.”
“We’ll meet in the classroom before breakfast,” Erna whispered.
As she lay in bed that night, propped up on one elbow so that she could look down the mountainside to the lake, Flip had a surprising sense of homecoming. She had missed, without realizing that she had missed it, being able to see the lake and the mountains of France from her bed, and they seemed to welcome her back. And when she lay down, the familiar pattern of light on the ceiling was a reassuring sight. As she began to get sleepy she sang in her mind, “On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree,” and reached up to feel the silver pear on its slender chain around her neck.
“At last!” Erna said the next morning as the three of them slipped into the classroom.
“Go on, quick, before someone comes in.” Jackie stepped onto the teacher’s platform and climbed up onto the table, sitting on it cross-legged.
“Yes, do hurry,” Flip begged, sitting on her desk.
“Well, I have to begin at the beginning and tell you how I found out.”
“Is it tragic?” Jackie asked.
“Yes, it is, and Percy was a heroine.”
“What did she do?”
“Stop asking questions and I’ll tell you!” Erna exclaimed in exasperation. “First of all, I had perfectly wonderful holidays. I stayed most of the time with a nurse from the hospital. My mother and father are getting a divorce and I’m glad.” And she stared at Flip and Jackie defiantly.
“Oh, Erna,” Jackie cried.
“Well, Mutti’s not a bit like your mother,” Erna said, “and she’s never liked me. But my father was just wonderful and Marianne, she’s the nurse, was awfully nice, too, and took me to the movies when she was off duty. And she told me my father was a great surgeon and a wonderful man and I saw an operation and I didn’t faint or anything and my father told me he was very happy I was going to be a doctor and he’d help me all he could. And he talked to me lots and lots and said he was sorry he never had time to write me or anything but he loved me just the same and he’d try to write me more. And then he told me he and Mutti disagreed about many things and they disagreed about the world and Germany and people and things in general. They’d disagreed about the war and the Nazis, only Father couldn’t say anything because of my brothers and Mutti and me and everything. He said all the injured and wounded people needed to be taken care of and it wasn’t their fault, mostly, not the fault of—what did he call them? the—the little people. So he felt all right taking care of them and he was glad I was here at school because he thought it was the best place in the world for me right now. And it was really wonderful, kids, because he’d always been kind of stern and everything and I’d never really known him before or felt that I had a father the way you two do, and now I have, even if Mutti still doesn’t love me.”
Flip and Jackie listened, neither of them looking at the other or at Erna because there was too much emotion in the room and they both felt full of too muc
h pity for Erna even while she was telling them how happy she was. But they caught the sorrow in her voice when she spoke of her mother, and Flip felt that having your mother not love you would be the bitterest way of all to lose her.
“Well, I expect you’re wondering what all this has to do with Percy,” Erna continued, her voice suddenly brisk. “My father’s brother, my Uncle Guenther, is a doctor, too, and he used to know Percy’s sister, the singer, and he knew about this school and that’s how I happened to come here. He was a Nazi for a while and then he wanted to stop being one and they put him in a prison, but they needed surgeons and so they let him out and he had to pretend he was a Nazi but all the time he was trying to work against them. Really he was. I know lots of them say that now because it’s—what’s the word Father used—expedient—but Uncle Guenther really did try, and then he just took care of the hurt people like my father did because hurt people should be taken care of no matter who they are.”
“It’s all right,” Jackie said. “We believe you. Do go on about Percy.”
“Well, Percy’s sister sang in Berlin for the Americans and Uncle Guenther came to see her and they got to talking about old times and everything and then they talked about the war and how it was awful that friends should be enemies and they each said they’d wanted to be on—on the side of life and not on the side of death. And Percy’s sister said she hadn’t been able to do anything but sing. Madame and her husband had been living in Paris where he taught history at the Sorbonne and Percy taught art at one of the lycées. They were both wonderful skiers and they left and came to Switzerland, to the border between Switzerland and Germany, and they became guides who helped people escape into Switzerland. Their daughter had died of pneumonia just at the beginning of the war and it made Percy very serious. Uncle Guenther said that before that she had been very gay and used to love to go to parties and things. Anyhow, they became these guides, I mean Madame and her husband did, and once when they were bringing a party over the border they were discovered and Percy’s husband was shot just before they got into Switzerland.”
And Both Were Young Page 18
